10 Heroic Empress Phase 2 - Help Needed!

[Justanoob]

Hello, everyone! So, we seem to be able to get to phase 2 all the time without much problem whether we 4 heal it or 3 heal it. The problem we're having is our tanks getting destroyed.

Our Main Raid setup is as follows:

Tanks
Blood DK (505 ilvl tank gear)
Guardian Druid (505 ilvl tank gear)

DPS
Ret Paladin (can be a 4th healer)
Fury Warrior (can be a 3rd tank with 495 ilvl tank gear)
Lock
Hunter
Ele Shaman

Heals
Resto Druid
Disc Priest
Resto Shaman (mainspec is dps)

We've tried multiple ways and really aren't making much phase 2 progress. We've tried 3 healing and 3 tanking with the DK on the Reavers and the Warrior and Druid splitting the Windblades. We've tried 2 tanking and 4 healing with the DK picking up 2 Reavers and 1 Windblade, and the Druid picking up the rest of the Windblades. None of these really seem to work well... they're getting destroyed and our healers are going oom.

So, a couple questions...

1) Do you think if we 2 tank/4 heal it, the 495 geared Warrior would be best for picking up the Windblades over a Druid and DK who have 10 more ilvl than him? If he does pick up the Windblades, who would be a better tank for picking up the 2 Reavers and 1 Windblade?

2) Do you trap the a Reaver as soon as a trap is available?

3) What was your biggest breakthrough moment in the fight? What little trick made this fight work for you?


As always, any and all help is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!

---------- Post added 2013-02-11 at 10:43 PM ----------

To add to this, what we're thinking of doing now is 2 tank and 4 healing with our Warrior and Druid tanking. The DK would go frost with Chillblains. The Druid would pick up the 2 Reavers and 1 Windblade. The Warrior will pick up the rest of it. Once the Warrior's cd's wear off he'll start kiting around. Does anyone else do it quite like this?

[Deleted]

My guild do it with Prot Pala/Guardian Druid and 4 healers.

Assign 2 healers to each tank and don't ever let them stop casting direct healing on the tanks, when all adds are alive and beating on them. We wiped several times due to tank death and every time we could check the log and see that there was a gap of maybe 2-3 seconds without any direct healing. Use external CD's like Ironbark, Pain suppression and Barrier.

We have me (Bear) pick up the right side adds and run them to the left side. Huge dmg on the Bear during this, where I pop Incarnation and Nature's Vigil to make sure I have threat on everything while generating enough Rage to keep up Savage Defense and can self heal while rotating Ironbark, followed by my own CD's. When I get to the left side, I pick up 1 Windblade from the right side pack and the Prot Pala taunts my Reaver. We mark a Windblade from my group the second the appear and it's being focused down asap.

We then tank each our pack with a few yards between us, making sure that the Reavers shit only hits the Prot Pala. 1 Windblade from the right side pack is being kited by our Lock, until I get in position and taunts it off of him. Then we stay at our marks, unless a healer can't reach us. In this case we move a bit forward, just enough to be in range.

Most of your CD's should be going to the tank tanking the Windblades, since it's going to be nasty.

[Aircroth]

I would love a response to this as well, we have had around ~50 attempts, not getting past phase 2 on any of them, it's demoralizing everyone in our raid group and no one can figure out what we're doing wrong.

I've watched countless videos of p2, and our positioning follows all of them, let the warrior take 5 Windblades and the dk to take the 2 Reavers and 1 Windblade with the raid stacking one point and moving to the other when the first trap gets created. Everytime we have at least 2 deaths, mostly the warrior tank getting insta-gibbed as his cooldown runs off, as well as random healer/dps deaths from what I assume to be uninterrupted dispatch what are we doing wrong (apart from missing dispatch interrupts)?

If anyone could help I would be grateful.

[NeverStop]

I would love a response to this as well, we have had around ~50 attempts, not getting past phase 2 on any of them, it's demoralizing everyone in our raid group and no one can figure out what we're doing wrong.

I've watched countless videos of p2, and our positioning follows all of them, let the warrior take 5 Windblades and the dk to take the 2 Reavers and 1 Windblade with the raid stacking one point and moving to the other when the first trap gets created. Everytime we have at least 2 deaths, mostly the warrior tank getting insta-gibbed as his cooldown runs off, as well as random healer/dps deaths from what I assume to be uninterrupted dispatch what are we doing wrong (apart from missing dispatch interrupts)?

If anyone could help I would be grateful.

If you are fixated, you need to run away as far as possible. The Windblades do Sonic Blade even if you're not in melee range, which hits for 200k+ a tick.

[Divinedoom]

We do 2 tank, 3 heal. 1 tank takes 5 windblades, other tank takes 2 reavers and 1 windblade. Rotate all the big cd's at the start before fixates go out, the damadge will be lighter after some mobs are kited out with fixates.

DONT aoe the windblades. You have plenty of time in this phase, you need to wait for pools anyway. Mark one and have all dps single target it down. Not a good tactic for getting your dps ranked, great tactic for not having your tanks die.

We leave the windblade on the reaver tank alive for a while even after the 2 reavers are trapped to drop new healthstones, have the healers regen some etc. She will respawn when the last windblade is killed (or on a timer if you're too slow).

[Gouca]

BUMP, we're also stuck on this with Blood DK & Druid tanks.. neither has proper DPS spec so can't use our prot. Warrior.
We've only tried a couple of times, but even with 4 healers the tanks simply die in P2.

Is it doable without block tanks?

[Deleted]

BUMP, we're also stuck on this with Blood DK & Druid tanks.. neither has proper DPS spec so can't use our prot. Warrior.
We've only tried a couple of times, but even with 4 healers the tanks simply die in P2.

Is it doable without block tanks?

Ofc it is. I'm a Guardian Druid and I tank all the Windblades. If your tanks are dying, your healers need to step it up. If you read my first reply to this thread, I explain how we approach the fight. Splitting up the adds, rotating CD's and making sure tanks are in range of healers at all times.

Remember that you can use a ranged dps like Hunter/Lock to kite a Windblade at the beginning, just to ease the damage on the tanks.

[Deleted]

Doable without block tanks - yes, but it WILL probably be more difficult (no personal experience though).

All our kills so far have been done with 2 tanks (me=warrior + pala) and 4 healers (disc+pala+shaman+druid).
The 4th healer doesn't really help with the P2 tank instagib problem, it's more for safety in phase 1.

I am on Windblade duty, which means I drop my Mocking Banner to the right side (and get a MD from our hunter as well), leap to the left side so I only hit two of the small adds, charge back to the right group and use (glyphed!) Shield Wall immediately. The pala tank taunts the right Reaver off me as soon as it gives me the poison buff.
When the Shield Wall is over, I get a PainSup and when that's ending, I get a HoSac. By that time at least one of the adds should be dead or dying and I still have Demo Shout and Last Stand for any oh-shit moments. This whole time I'm spamming SBar (although initially when I pick them up I use SBlock).

The pala is cycling his own cooldowns (somebody explained that in detail in one of the other threads here).

We're not using Shockwave or any other AoE stuns, because the swing timer reset is extremely dangerous. I'm also not doing any kiting - can't really DPS during that. I just checked logs and about 40% of the total damage done to Windblades is coming from me, so I'd say it's kinda important for being able to kill them quickly .

When the first two Windblades are dead, we trap the first Reaver and just keep knocking the Windblades back and stunning them so they don't have a chance to break the trap. Interrupting Dispatches immediately is extremely important; our fury Warr is awesome at this and when he's kiting a fixated Windblade I can do it as backup. Melee have to be extremely careful about those fixates; if they don't move immediately after the first hit and/or pop a big survival CD, they're dead.

What I think was our breakthrough in phase 2 was just adhering to the cooldown rotation above and my decision to stop being slow and terrible at picking the adds up properly and maintaining a reasonable Barrier uptime .

[Choptimus]

Pick em up, blow your big cd, into a painsup, while your dps focus down windblades 1 at a time. 2 should be dead by the time big cds are over. From there you're fine, just pew pew.

Swing timers resetting won't kill you on 10man for sure. Use shockwave. You can even get the tank to wiggle backwards to stagger them again after the stun ends.

[Justanoob]

I really appreciate all the replies. I believe we are going straight in there tonight by extending it. This thread definitely gave us a lot of ideas!

[Nairobi]

I really appreciate all the replies. I believe we are going straight in there tonight by extending it. This thread definitely gave us a lot of ideas!

2 weeks to get that FOS! It's what we're doing as well, and I'll def be trying/suggesting some of these ideas tonight. Best of luck and thanks for the tips.

[Collins311]

I would love a response to this as well, we have had around ~50 attempts, not getting past phase 2 on any of them, it's demoralizing everyone in our raid group and no one can figure out what we're doing wrong.

I've watched countless videos of p2, and our positioning follows all of them, let the warrior take 5 Windblades and the dk to take the 2 Reavers and 1 Windblade with the raid stacking one point and moving to the other when the first trap gets created. Everytime we have at least 2 deaths, mostly the warrior tank getting insta-gibbed as his cooldown runs off, as well as random healer/dps deaths from what I assume to be uninterrupted dispatch what are we doing wrong (apart from missing dispatch interrupts)?

If anyone could help I would be grateful.

As a prot warrior pop SW, pick up the windblades and then kite them the entire phase if you can't handled the damage. Using piercing howl to give yourself some distance. I just do a loop around the pools we are making. You'll take no damage after you pick up the adds.